You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Army ants don't see very well.

They navigate by smelling the pheromones laid by other army ants while also laying their

own pheromones as they walk.

These pheromone trails, if they loop back on themselves by accident, cause the ants to

just march in circles until they die from either exhaustion or dehydration.

That young is a science writer for the Atlantic.

And this to me is the perfect metaphor for the America's response to the pandemic, because

the ants are just walled in by their own instincts.

There's nothing keeping them in circles other than that they can only send what is immediately

in front of them.

They have no sense of the bigger picture, no sense of the future, and no coordinating

force to guide them out of this endless fatal spiral.

In his latest piece, Ed argues that this spiral is happening here in the US because we've

really been playing catch up with the virus.

We are reacting and responding, instead of consistently planning and preventing, which

has put us in what he calls an intuition nightmare.

So it means that we keep on thinking about the pandemic in the wrong ways.

Our attitudes, our intuitions for what is happening are also leading us astray.

So we tend to bounce from one thing to the other without putting in a web of measures.

And unless we start thinking about the problem in different and better ways that match the

magnitude of the challenge in front of us, we're going to continue making bad decisions

...